During the first round of Congressional hearings last month, Toyota was
blindsided by one Professor David Gilbert who was added to the witness list
at the last minute to talk about an experiment in which he induced sudden
unintended acceleration (SUA) in a late model Toyota Avalon. His test was
reproduced in a shoddy ABC News report with Brian Ross behind the wheel and
referenced often in the Congressional hearings by politicians trying to
understand the complicated method by which Gilbert got the Avalon to take
off running.

EDITOR'S NOTE: This report was written by autoblog.com and is incorrect in
that Toyota was not caught off-guard by the Gilbert test. The knew about it and conducted their own
test several hours before the Congressional hearing with Jim Lentz. In a story written by
The Auto Channel we deal with the issue in full. CLICK HERE

Back to autoblog.com story

Well, Toyota and its independent consulting firm Exponent (they're
funded by Toyota but produce results reportedly not influenced by their
client) have studied Gilbert's experiment and been able to reproduce the
results themselves. In Toyota's words:

The analysis of Professor's Gilbert's demonstration establishes that he
has reengineered and rewired the signals from the accelerator pedal. This
rewired circuit is highly unlikely to occur naturally and can only be
contrived in a laboratory. There is no evidence to suggest that this highly
unlikely scenario has ever occurred in the real world. As shown in the
Exponent and Toyota evaluations, with such artificial modifications,
similar results can be obtained in other vehicles.

Likewise, a small portion of owners with vehicles that have already
received the fix for Toyota's sticky pedal recall have complained to the
National Highway Traffic Safety Administration that the fix didn't work.
These owners have reportedly experienced SUA after having their vehicles
fixed. Toyota has moved quickly to evaluate these complaints and submit its
results to NHTSA. Again, Toyota in its own words:

The evaluations have found no evidence of a failure of the vehicle
electronic throttle control system, the recent recall remedies or the brake
override system.

What these two moves by Toyota tell us is that the embattled Japanese
automaker is finally sticking up for itself in the face of media pundits
and politicians who have used this unfortunate situation to score points
with their audiences and constituents.